Following the lead of David Letterman, Jay Leno and others, John Stewart and Stephen Colbert will be back on the air next week — airing new but writer-less episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on both Comedy Network and CTV, with an assist on the former by Tom Green.

The series have been in reruns here and on Comedy Central since the start of the WGA strike in November, but recently announced plans to return to air, though it remains to be seen how the heavily scripted talk shows will manage without writers.

‘We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence,’ said Stewart and Colbert in a joint statement.

On Comedy, Daily Show and Colbert will be preceded by Tom Green’s House Tonight, an hour-long talker hosted by the Ottawa-born comic. Green has been on and off the airwaves for several years, but has recently been running a mini talk show online at www.tomgreen.com. Tom Green’s House Tonight will air weeknights at 10 p.m. ET, leading into Daily Show and Colbert on Mondays through Thursdays.

On CTV, Daily Show and Colbert will return to their pre-strike timeslots at 12 a.m. ET and 12:30 a.m. ET, respectively.

Reports from Hollywood predict that, without writers, the shows will have to do without trademark bits such as Stewart’s opening take on the day’s headlines or Colbert’s monologue The Word. It has also been speculated that Daily Show could fill time by rerunning segments from before the strike.

This week saw the return of late-night heavy hitters including The Late Show with David Letterman, seen here on the OMNIs, and both Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, which air on the A-Channels. Letterman, whose show is produced though his company Worldwide Pants, returned with his writers, thanks to a separate deal struck with the WGA. O’Brien and Leno are going without, as their shows are produced by NBC.